The Unjustifiably Obscure Dead

Today: Rosalind Franklin.
Dr. Franklin was the Cambrdge-educated x-ray crystalographer whose pioneering work in molecular chemistry lead directly to Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA. She, however, was a woman, who didn't dress up all perty and it was London and it was 1953. Indeed, she was not allowed to dine in the faculty club at the King's College London where she was working and was a professor. And there is some speculation that her own research partner, one Wilkins, ratted out her progress to Watson and Crick--at the very least she was treated as a pariah. Watson's own publisher made him remove some of the nastier references to her in his memoir--though her only apparent sin seems to have been her sex and her brilliance.
All those years of working with x-rays resulted in her death from ovarian cancer in 1958. She was only 38 years old. In 1962 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins for the discovery of DNA, though they couldn't have done it without her. She was not elligible, the Nobel is not awarded posthumously.